bit of a rest.
I can safely say we were bloody weary most of the time, but it wasn't true about us being stupid. Sarah was dux of the school and had to refuse being made head prefect. That's because of what she had to do at home. She washed and ironed and cooked and cleaned and
looked after Colleen, which left her no time to do the school job properly, because the head prefect had to have meetings and do other extra-curricular duties after school. It was her own decision to turn it down.
They made her vice-prefect anyway because she was better and Page 34
more popular than Murray Templeton, whose father was the Holden dealer in town and so was only made head prefect by Sarah-default.
I admit Bozo's reports weren't always up to scratch but that didn't mean he was stupid. Nobody could call Bozo stupid, he just wasn't that interested in school work. Even as a thirteen-year-old he wasn't big, but he was wiry and bloody strong and could lift two garbage bins at once into the back of the truck if we were running late of a morning.
He was also a self-taught mechanic and kept the Diamond T going after it should have long since conked out. He could fix anything mechanical and when the family was on the bones of our arses, Bozo could always be relied on to sell something he'd repaired.
We'd collect stuff people had thrown away, bits of bicycles, old hand-pushed lawnmowers, hot-water jugs, electric kettles, hedge clippers with the blades rusted, kids' scooters, prams with wheels missing, old deck chairs, primus stoves, hurricane lamps, Vacola Bottling Systems, anything that could be re-wired or scraped back, cleaned, repaired or painted. Bozo would do the fixing and I'd do the scraping and painting and we'd go halves when we sold it. Sometimes I'd have money jingling in my pocket, enough to toss my jam sandwiches in the bin and buy a Herbert Adams pie one day and a Four
'n' Twenty the next for school lunch for a whole week. I never could decide which tasted the best. Or I'd pay for the family to go to the pictures, though we generally ended up giving our profits to Nancy when a cash crisis hit, which was just about all the time.
Bozo even built two complete bicycles from scratch from parts collected over three years. All we needed was tyres, tubes and valves and half a dozen new spokes. Miraculously Tommy came good with one of his very rare wins with the local SP bookmaker and gave us the money. It was magic. Me and Bozo had our own bikes. But then shortly-after, Tommy went up the hill again and the SP bookie came around to see Nancy. It turned out that the money Tommy had given us wasn't won on the horses after all, that he owed the SP ten quid, and where was it?
I suppose we could have argued that we weren't responsible for Tommy's gambling debts and the bookmaker would just have to wait until he came out of gaol. But that wasn't Nancy's way.
'When you do that, all you do is accumulate shame. Soon enough you're drowning in it and people don't trust your word any more. Better to do without, pay our way and keep our noses clean.'
'Yeah, yeah,' Mike would say afterwards, mimicking Nancy, 'it's not your father's fault, it's something that happened to him in the war.'
So after only three weeks of the luxury of riding to school and parking our bikes with the other kids in the shelter behind the boys' toilet, they were sold for eight pounds and Nancy found the other two quid somewhere and we paid the SP bookie in full.
The thing I couldn't understand was, except for the bike tyres that cost three quid, we never seemed to benefit from Tommy's life as a burglar. The Shamrock did, the SP bookie certainly did, but our family fortunes remained permanently at low tide. I mean, he couldn't have got nabbed every time he did a heist, could he? There must have been times when he'd fenced stuff and was suddenly flush with dough and we should've benefited, but I don't remember it ever Page 35
happening in my time.
Mike and me never once
I can safely say we were bloody weary most of the time, but it wasn't true about us being stupid. Sarah was dux of the school and had to refuse being made head prefect. That's because of what she had to do at home. She washed and ironed and cooked and cleaned and
looked after Colleen, which left her no time to do the school job properly, because the head prefect had to have meetings and do other extra-curricular duties after school. It was her own decision to turn it down.
They made her vice-prefect anyway because she was better and Page 34
more popular than Murray Templeton, whose father was the Holden dealer in town and so was only made head prefect by Sarah-default.
I admit Bozo's reports weren't always up to scratch but that didn't mean he was stupid. Nobody could call Bozo stupid, he just wasn't that interested in school work. Even as a thirteen-year-old he wasn't big, but he was wiry and bloody strong and could lift two garbage bins at once into the back of the truck if we were running late of a morning.
He was also a self-taught mechanic and kept the Diamond T going after it should have long since conked out. He could fix anything mechanical and when the family was on the bones of our arses, Bozo could always be relied on to sell something he'd repaired.
We'd collect stuff people had thrown away, bits of bicycles, old hand-pushed lawnmowers, hot-water jugs, electric kettles, hedge clippers with the blades rusted, kids' scooters, prams with wheels missing, old deck chairs, primus stoves, hurricane lamps, Vacola Bottling Systems, anything that could be re-wired or scraped back, cleaned, repaired or painted. Bozo would do the fixing and I'd do the scraping and painting and we'd go halves when we sold it. Sometimes I'd have money jingling in my pocket, enough to toss my jam sandwiches in the bin and buy a Herbert Adams pie one day and a Four
'n' Twenty the next for school lunch for a whole week. I never could decide which tasted the best. Or I'd pay for the family to go to the pictures, though we generally ended up giving our profits to Nancy when a cash crisis hit, which was just about all the time.
Bozo even built two complete bicycles from scratch from parts collected over three years. All we needed was tyres, tubes and valves and half a dozen new spokes. Miraculously Tommy came good with one of his very rare wins with the local SP bookmaker and gave us the money. It was magic. Me and Bozo had our own bikes. But then shortly-after, Tommy went up the hill again and the SP bookie came around to see Nancy. It turned out that the money Tommy had given us wasn't won on the horses after all, that he owed the SP ten quid, and where was it?
I suppose we could have argued that we weren't responsible for Tommy's gambling debts and the bookmaker would just have to wait until he came out of gaol. But that wasn't Nancy's way.
'When you do that, all you do is accumulate shame. Soon enough you're drowning in it and people don't trust your word any more. Better to do without, pay our way and keep our noses clean.'
'Yeah, yeah,' Mike would say afterwards, mimicking Nancy, 'it's not your father's fault, it's something that happened to him in the war.'
So after only three weeks of the luxury of riding to school and parking our bikes with the other kids in the shelter behind the boys' toilet, they were sold for eight pounds and Nancy found the other two quid somewhere and we paid the SP bookie in full.
The thing I couldn't understand was, except for the bike tyres that cost three quid, we never seemed to benefit from Tommy's life as a burglar. The Shamrock did, the SP bookie certainly did, but our family fortunes remained permanently at low tide. I mean, he couldn't have got nabbed every time he did a heist, could he? There must have been times when he'd fenced stuff and was suddenly flush with dough and we should've benefited, but I don't remember it ever Page 35
happening in my time.
Mike and me never once
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